The Canon / Pillars / Psychology & Science
Pillars · 1960
Psycho-Cybernetics
Psychological SystemsPsycho-Cybernetics is Maxwell Maltz's translation of mind-power doctrine into the vocabulary of engineering and behavioral psychology. Its central claim, rooted in his clinical observation that patients often kept feeling disfigured after successful surgery, is that the decisive variable in behavior and achievement is the internal "self-image," so that durable change requires editing that image rather than forcing behavior.
Drawing on Norbert Wiener's cybernetics, Prescott Lecky's self-consistency theory, and the metaphor of the guided servomechanism, Maltz argues that the nervous system functions as an automatic, goal-seeking machine that steers toward whatever target the self-image defines. He operationalizes the idea through mental rehearsal and the "theater of the mind," a visualization technique anticipating later sports psychology and performance coaching.
Written in secular, clinical language, the book restates the New Thought thesis that inner conception governs outer outcome in terms acceptable to a mainstream audience, making it the crucial bridge between metaphysical mind-power and modern self-help.
In its words
A human being always acts and feels and performs in accordance with what he imagines to be true about himself and his environment.
In short, you will "act like" the sort of person you conceive yourself to be. Not only this, but you literally cannot act otherwise, in spite of all your conscious efforts or will power.
Practices it teaches
Visualization & Mental Rehearsal — The Theater of the Mind
Visualization (mental rehearsal, motor imagery) is the deliberate, vivid imagining of a performance, outcome, or new self-image as if happening now — repeated until it feels familiar to the nervous system.
Lineage
The author
Maxwell MaltzSelf-image as servo-mechanism
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Key terms
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